Nataraj admitted candidly that she had begun with no clear plan, let alone a blueprint for action. She had had no prior training in grassroots work, and there had been no bank of knowledge anywhere on the most effective ways to support sex workers. But the fledgling organization had rapidly taken on an effective shape—because Selvi and several of the other women from the Madras reformatory had found their way to it and would change it in ways that Nataraj said she could never have foreseen.
As Natraj understood it, Selvi had first gone back to Ulundurpettai to live with her husband, to try to make things work with him. “But she found once again that she could not get along with her husband and her in-laws. She came back to Madras with her son but decided she was not going to sell sex anymore. She heard through the grapevine that I had set up a place to work on AIDS. So one day she walked into my office and just said, ‘I want to work with you.’
“Realizing that I clearly did not recognize her, she said, ‘Don’t you remember me? You met me in jail, in the remand home. I am one of the women you freed.’
“I asked her, ‘What work will you do?’ There was no money available at that time to hire anyone to work on AIDS. She gave that question some thought and then answered, ‘I will tell other people what I went through. Whether you pay me or not, I will come and work.’
“And then for the next many years, until her death just some months earlier this year, Selvi was really a tireless crusader. She would go to other sex workers and say, ‘Hey, I had sex without a condom. Look at me now. Don’t let this happen to you. This doesn’t need to happen.’ ”
That is how “peer education”—as the strategy of relying on credible community members to influence community behavior and norms is known in development parlance—became a core element of SIAAP’s strategy. Though sex workers were loath to trust outsiders or authority figures, they trusted Selvi. Soon, overcoming their fear of informers, they began to attend educational meetings at the organization and from there began working as part-time peer educators themselves. It exponentially expanded the group’s reach and impact.
From all that Selvi had suffered in her life—her abusive marriage, her years of selling sex to support herself and her young son, her HIV diagnosis, and her long years of imprisonment—she knew better than any outsider about the realities faced by those women and what exactly would help them the most. That had enabled the group to tailor itself to the characteristics of sex work in Madras, Nataraj explained.
In Madras, and generally across Tamil Nadu, brothels were a rarity and sex work happened in almost exactly the kind of places that men who had sex with men sought out. Once sex workers picked up clients from crowded areas such as bus stops and railway stations, cinema halls and highway rest sites, they showed the same ingenuity as homosexual men in finding places to have sex in this crowded country where privacy and space are luxuries available only to a minuscule elite. Any nook and cranny was used to have sex, literally any building or dark space in which two people copulating for a few minutes, fully dressed, might not be discovered: a patch of bushes near a bus stop, the ditches off highways or railway lines, corners of construction sites, city parks, and, if the men could afford them, huts and tenements that called themselves “lodges” and “hotels” but provided tiny rooms by the hour. And just like us homosexual men, they made do with whatever they could find—even if that meant that they lay on shit and garbage while having sex or risked being caught by the police.
So Selvi and the other sex workers who had joined SIAAP began to identify convenient spots in which to leave supplies of condoms that the women could access. They were placed in public toilets or inside broken lampposts or left with helpful vegetable vendors or tea stall owners. They even negotiated with “lodge” owners about placing condoms in rooms.
The more I learned from Nataraj and other women at the group about Selvi’s transformation—from the silent, traumatized young woman held captive in the Madras reformatory to a trailblazing activist—the more intensely I regretted that I had not gotten to meet her. (Selvi had died in 1998 just a few months before I reached Chennai.) It was a revelation to see how deeply Selvi had inspired others even in such a truncated life. One of her closest friends at the collective, Mary Thomas, a sex worker from the neighboring state of Kerala, was so inspired by Selvi’s dedication to others that she established a grassroots charity honoring her friend—the Selvi Memorial Illam Society. Illam means “shelter” in Tamil, and the charity runs a shelter for people sick with AIDS, along with providing home-based care, child care, and support groups.
Selvi
Nataraj quickly realized that the women desperately needed practical support. She began building alliances with health-care institutions, lawyers, and the government’s women’s rights and human rights agencies. Gynecologists came to brief the women on sexual infections and HIV. Feminist activists and lawyers introduced the women to issues related to their rights as citizens and to debates about gender and patriarchy. They, in turn, were sensitized to the particularly harsh difficulties faced by sex workers, marking the beginning of a long-term engagement.
From the discussions at the group meetings, Nataraj realized that she had to do something to help the women “build their self-respect and stop viewing themselves as ‘doing wrong.’ ” She was struck that they castigated themselves so bitterly for selling sex, despite the compulsions that had propelled them into the work. “Many of these women entered sex work because they had been abused or deserted by husbands, lovers, or family members,” said Nataraj. “Others wanted to supplement their husbands’ earnings because the money they made was too little for their families to survive on. In any case, entry into sex work also displayed the autonomy of these women, rather than solely their victimhood.
“So we encouraged them to share their life experiences—not only about the desertion, abuse, and violence but also about survival as well as hopes and aspirations for their children and their own relationships with husbands, lovers, and other family members. They gradually began to see themselves as strong women, women who would not be easily cowed.”
That awareness was very evident in the women I talked to. Thus, Mary Thomas said, “Every time something goes wrong, men put the blame on the women! Men say they go astray because of women. Men say they take to drink and drugs because of women. Men say they get HIV because of the prostitutes. The men never bear responsibility!”
One of the fronts that the group focused on almost immediately was tackling the violence the women suffered at the hands of the police. From the regular group meetings with the sex workers Nataraj realized that their “one common desire was to get the police off their backs.”
SIAAP first used persuasion. “Selvi, some sex workers from the locality, and I would go together to the local police station and discuss the issue,” said Nataraj. “The key was to touch the humanity of the cop in a completely nonjudgmental way. We pointed out that sex work had existed through the ages and often was a product of sexual desire of the client, on the one hand, and the poverty of the woman, on the other. We would tell them that there was no right or wrong involved, and the risk of HIV made it urgent for them to help both parties protect themselves—rather than take a moralistic stand.
“I think the cops bought the logic because many of them were also clients of sex workers. They appreciated our approach as well as the condoms and education material we left behind.
“For their part, the women became more circumspect in their behavior at the pickup sites, making sure that they did not show up tipsy or disheveled. They also made a pact among themselves to stop pimps from exploiting underage girls, threatening to report them to the police with SIAAP’s help. In any case, over time, the police in Madras began to treat the women better. The abuse and arrests reduced considerably, even more so when we began to regularly send letters of appreciation to police stations.”
Even so, confrontation was unavoidable, because a core of policemen continued to exploit and a
buse sex workers. The group decided to challenge the police whenever any of the sex workers belonging to or known to the organization was arrested. On closely analyzing the federal law under which many sex workers were arrested, Nataraj and the human rights lawyers supporting SIAAP realized that it did not criminalize the act of selling sex itself but penalized every activity related to it—such as soliciting, renting premises for prostitution, pimping, or operating a brothel.
“Everybody—the women themselves as well as the police and lawyers—thought that sex work was clearly illegal in India, rather than a gray area,” Nataraj recalled. It was because of that assumption that sex workers helplessly and unquestioningly pled guilty to whatever charges the police filed against them when produced in court, even if they were false.
The confusion reflected an unresolved contradiction in the law, which had remained largely unchanged since its first version had been enacted in 1923 by the British colonial government and had inherited the tensions dating back to that time between the government’s goal of squashing prostitution and a reluctance to be seen as punishing the “victimized” women too harshly. The damaging result was a law that criminalized sex workers not in principle but in practice. Tellingly, even though the law is purportedly aimed at preventing the sexual exploitation of women—it is titled the Immoral Traffic (Prevention) Act—its real goal is to punish women in sex work. (This contradictory approach had spread worldwide through being institutionalized in the UN Convention for the Suppression of the Traffic in Persons and of the Exploitation of the Prostitution of Others of 1949. In contrast, in the harshly prohibitionist approach of the United States, both prostitutes and their clients are explicitly criminalized in almost every state.) Nataraj and the lawyers saw an opportunity in that confusion.
Nataraj and the lawyers knew that it would be difficult for the police to provide hard proof that sex workers were soliciting—unless they had been entrapped by the police—and decided to focus on that weakness in challenging future arrests. “We knew that the women would win if only they found the confidence to plead not guilty,” said Nataraj.
“But, given the risks,” said Nataraj, “it took a few years before one brave woman—Saroja—agreed. But she won! And then more women began to challenge their arrests. And they won, too. We had soon overturned dozens of arrests in the state.” The sex workers were soon confident enough to challenge arrests on their own, without turning to Nataraj or Madras-based lawyers.
Drawn by SIAAP’s proven utility, increasing numbers of sex workers joined the local collectives that the group launched in cities and towns across Tamil Nadu. Those collectives were run by the sex workers themselves, with officers chosen through regular elections. In the formative years, SIAAP provided seed funding and matching grants, but, in time, the local collectives’ expenses were met entirely by membership fees.
From my visits to the local collectives over the years, I could see the immeasurable benefits of participation. In the one I came to know best, in the tiny town of Theni, three hundred miles south of Chennai, the two dozen women would meet once or twice a week, always in the morning, as they sold sex in the late afternoon and early evenings before returning home. By 9:00 a.m., they would be grouped in a circle on the mud floor of the rented hut that functioned as their office. It was foremost a gathering of close friends, and there was much hugging, chattering, giggling, and sharing of snacks, alongside the work-related discussions.
Most of the women were in their twenties, a few in their thirties, the two eldest in their early forties. Every one of them had two or more children. Every one of them was married or had been married before being widowed or abandoned or before leaving an abusive husband. Like other married Tamil women they wore mangalsutra pendants, traditional jewelry and saris, a bindi on their foreheads, and a bunch of fragrant jasmine flowers pinned in their hair. Almost every one of them had regular employment, working for daily wages on construction sites or in agriculture like their husbands, virtually the only jobs available in that essentially rural area. The men invariably earned three to four times what women were paid for labor. But selling sex, discreetly and without their families’ knowledge, was an even more lucrative earner for the women, providing the largest earnings for their families. I was surprised to learn that most of them were not from particularly impoverished backgrounds or castes. That was one striking indication of the dire financial pressures on average families in the area, the other being the fact that a surprisingly large proportion of local women—perhaps as many as one in twenty-five—sold sex on the side to earn money for their families.
What struck me most at every one of those meetings was their confidence. The women knew that they had one another as well as a formal organization to help them. From experience, I knew that having a community to turn to means the difference between hopelessness and hopefulness, especially for those of us who do not have a natal or visible community to begin with.
Their change in outlook and behavior had helped them negotiate as a group with local politicians, government officials, and the police, gradually winning the rights and welfare benefits they were entitled to, particularly vital for the significant number of single mothers among them. The state and local administration provided the women with voter identity cards as well as ration cards to buy subsidized staple foods and changed the rule for school admissions so that children would be admitted on the basis of the mother’s guardianship alone (rather than requiring a father’s presence).
The police began to treat those newly assertive women with caution. Their old practice of arresting the women on trumped-up charges—to extract bribes or free sex or simply as moralistic punishment—diminished. They also began to act against men who harassed or exploited the women. Giggling, her tone almost incredulous, one of the women said, “Now the policemen request us to have a seat if we ever go to the police station to lodge a complaint!”
The on-the-ground gains won by SIAAP across Tamil Nadu in that short time were remarkable. The group’s impact had also, however, stretched far beyond the grass roots: it had succeeded in pushing the issue of sex workers’ rights and well-being onto the agenda of the Indian government. I was astonished to see that, as my experience of grassroots groups in India had been that even those who dealt successfully with local administrations struggled to make a measurable impact on national policy makers.
In 1995, the new chairperson of the National Commission for Women, the prominent social activist V. Mohini Giri, committed the commission to issuing an in-depth report on sex work. She supported Nataraj’s plea that the commission’s members pay heed to sex workers’ views and demands, rather than deciding matters without their participation. Eventually Giri herself met more than two thousand sex workers across the country, and the penultimate draft of the report was opened up for comments from forty sex workers, notably including Selvi and Mary Thomas. That set a hugely important precedent in India, establishing that sex workers—no less than other women and other citizens—had a right to be heard in matters concerning them, even at the rarefied level of national policy making. They were now legitimate participants in public policy making.
Sex work was an unlikely choice of issues for the National Commission for Women, a governmental body. Until AIDS brought sex workers to the government’s attention, every branch of the state had shunned those women, their only contact with the state being the predations of the police force, harsh sentences from the lower courts, and punitive incarceration in reformatories. And across the decades since Independence, the women’s movement had paid no heed to women in sex work, focusing its energies on more broad-based concerns such as domestic violence, “dowry killings,” and inheritance rights. The wider nongovernmental sector had ignored sex workers as well, at the most offering high-handed rehabilitation efforts predicated on the women’s forswearing sex work and forever after living as impoverished penitents.
As Nataraj remarked to me, only overt prejudice against women who sold sex could explain s
uch sweeping neglect. Even in a country where innumerable women, often cutting across class, face severe disadvantages, sex workers were arguably the most disempowered, worst treated, and most critically in need of support from feminists and other activists. It said everything that it was journalists and public health professionals, not mainstream activists or feminists, who had most strongly taken up the cause of those women and were instituting progressive and feminist models of empowerment.
The commission’s report—Societal Violence on Women and Children in Prostitution—was published in early 1996. It was a bombshell of a document. The opening page said, “Women in prostitution are first and foremost equal citizens of India. . . . The fundamental rights toward basic amenities, comfort, freedom and dignity should be available to these women as much as they are to all the citizens of India.” I had never imagined that a report bearing the imprimatur of the Indian government would ever take such a respectful position, given how disgracefully it had treated them so far.
Indeed, the report—in essence—was a catalogue of the grievous wrongs done to sex workers by varied branches of the state. “The state’s key institutions, such as the police, schools and hospitals, are dismal in their attitudes and responses to these women,” said the report. “In fact, most of them have served as the opposite of their designated functions; they double their exploitation and extortion, along with exerting violence of varying degrees upon these women and their children.” Even basic social services such as government clinics and hospitals “are virtually beyond their access due to discriminatory attitudes and behavior of both the medical and the para-medical and the administrative personnel.”
An Indefinite Sentence Page 22
